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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • He tweeted “Her”, which explicitly tells us it’s a deliberate imitation of Scarlett’s voice in that movie. And he tried to negotiate licencing her famous voice, which she rejected.

    So it’s more than just a coincidence, it’s deliberate bad faith behaviour. Legally you can’t misrepresent a product as being from a famous person when it wasn’t, and he very much did that. I guess he was hoping she’d give in and accept the licensing agreement post-facto. But instead it looks he’s in legal deep water now.










  • The STM32WB55 in the flipper has a versatile wireless peripheral built in which can be used to implement various protocols including Bluetooth, zigbee, etc… Support for I2C, I2S and CAN is pretty standard stuff - the ESP32 is nothing special in these respects.

    Maybe they chose the STM32WB55 because its wireless support is more flexible than the ESP32 and allows them to implement a wider variety of protocols? Or possibly just better documented, giving them the chance to do things they can’t on the ESP32? I haven’t compared the inner workings of the two chips’ wireless support so I can’t say for sure.


  • The ESP32s are nice chips, but the STM32s are also really nice to work with and will work fine for this task. Changing to an ESP32 wouldn’t make any real difference to the user so the choice is moot really.

    I’ve designed products around both CPUs and they’re both pretty nice. The STM32 has somewhat better documentation, has cleaner low power modes and is a bit simpler when delving into the nitty gritty details. The ESP is more powerful and has some nice if complex features but I don’t like its low power handling as much.

    Overall I think I’d choose the STM32 for this task since it’s a little easier to make small, battery powered devices with it.




  • Trolley buses are a weird niche. They require permanent overhead cable infrastructure like trams do but don’t have the other benefits of trams - higher capacity, greater speed, better ride and no tyre pollution. I figure if you’re going to install a trolley bus route you probably might as well install rails at the same time and get the benefits of trams. (Aka streetcars for the North Americans out there)

    The City of London did assessments on trolley buses and found that the added capacity of trams made them the better choice pretty much anywhere trolley buses were proposed, despite the slightly higher install cost.